Tuesday, September 24
9:00 am: depart Portland for Caldera
2:00-4:00 pm: settling in (snacks available in the Hearth Room)
4:00-6:00 pm: opening session on the theme “Imbue,” followed by a workshop, “Play::Active”
6:00-7:30 pm: free time
7:30-9:00 pm: dinner
10:00 pm: presentation of video, images, and sound in the Library (new work by Tom Leeser)

About Tom Leeser
Tom Leeser is a media artist, educator, curator, and writer. He is Program Director of the Art and Technology Program and Director of the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). He received his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). His film, video, online work, interactive installations, and public performances have been exhibited at Eyebeam, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Machine Project, the Mount Wilson Observatory, MassMoca, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum, Redcat Theater, The Kitchen, The Millennium, Siggraph, and film and video festivals worldwide, with support from Art Matters, Creative Time, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. Recent projects include The Futures Project at the Centre for Living Arts, Radical Cosmologies at ISEA2012, Indirect Intention—A Home and Garden Intervention at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Future Imaginary at the Ben Maltz Gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design, The Lament Project—An Evening at the Manual Archives, Underground Cinemamachine at Machine Project and Object Lessons for Gigantic Artspace in New York. He is an editor and producer for the web-based journal and curatorial project viralnet.net.

About Alison Saar
Alison Saar studied art and art history at Scripps College and received an MFA from the Otis Art Institute. She has been awarded a United States Artists Fellowship, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and two National Endowment Fellowships. Her art is represented in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Informed by artistic traditions from the Americas to Africa and beyond, and by her mixed racial upbringing, Saar fuses paradoxical responses to the black-and-white delineations of political and social forces into a powerful, visual, and kinesthetic tension. She uses the everyday experience, history, and associations of her materials, African art and ritual, Greek mythology, and the stark sculptural tradition of German Expressionism to infuse her work with a primal intensity that challenges cultural and historic references and stereotypes.
See http://www.lalouver.com/html/saar_bio.html.

About Betye Saar
Betye Saar has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1984) and the Getty Foundation (1990). In 1994, she and Outterbridge represented the United States at the 22nd São Paulo Biennial. Her work is represented in numerous museum collections including the Detroit Institute of the Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Saar voices her political, racial, religious, and gender concerns in her art so that she may “reach across the barriers of art and life, to bridge cultural diversities, and forge new understandings.” Other works have sought to reveal marginalized and hidden histories, ones both personal and public. She has examined Asian and African diasporic religions in relation to personal spirituality, the construction of racial hierarchies based on skin tone within black communities, and the ways in which objects retain the memories and histories of their owners. Her most recent series, centered on the theme of mental, physical, and cultural imprisonment, was shown in the 2010 exhibition Betye Saar: CAGE at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. She is featured in several of the shows comprising Pacific Standard Time, a suite of twenty-six exhibitions funded by the Getty Foundation and taking place at multiple California museums. See http://www.michaelrosenfeldart.com/artists/betye-saar-b1926 and Time Magazine’s Legends at Work at http://lightbox.time.com/2013/09/12/when-age-produces-beauty-photographs-of-legends-at-work/#10.

Regarding Jacotot’s Claim That One Ignoramus Can Teach Another What He Himself Does Not Know*

Presented as part of Anna Craycroft’s C’mon Language project and the TBA:13 Festival

A critical conversation on method and madness, knowledge and respect, theory and nascent wonder, ignorance and arrogance, authority and tradition, judgment and distinction, learning and the pleasing of another, sober realism and the rage for justice, in the style of G.K. Chesterton, and drawing on the work of a wide range of interlocutors, including Hannah Arendt, Ivan Illich, John Dewey, Peter Sloterdijk, Jacques Rancière, Bifo, and the Black Mountain Founders, to help us rethink this thing called education, higher and other. What is the task of teaching and learning today in the midst of mounting economic and political pressures and scathing attacks, standardized testing and pedagogical formulae, peer learning and e-learning, service-industry models and dispensable teachers, reading-surveillance software and homework cams, high-interest student loans and uncertain futures, OpenCourseWare and its multimillion-dollar consortium? Please bring with you what you consider to be the single most important text for this discussion.

*Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

a few texts
Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” Between Past and Future
Claire Bishop, “The New Masters of Liberal Arts: Artists Rewrite the Rules of Pedagogy,” Education (MIT/Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art)
The Black Mountain College Prospectus (http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/)
G.K. Chesterton, “The Suicide of Thought,” Orthodoxy: A Personal Philosophy
Thierry de Duve, “An Ethics: Putting Aesthetic Transmission in Its Proper Place in the Art World,” Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)
John Dewey, “Criticism and Perception,” Art as Experience
Henry A. Giroux, “Critical Theory and Educational Practice,” Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition
Boris Groys, “Education by Infection,” Art School (Propositions for the 21st Century)
Jacques Rancière, “The Emancipated Spectator,” The Emancipated Spectator
Peter Sloterdijk, “Master Games: Trainers as Guarantors of the Art of Exaggeration,” You Must Change Your Life

The MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Ford Institute for Visual Education

Éireann Lorsung is the author of Her Book and Music for Landing Planes By as well as co-founder of MIEL, a micro-press established in 2011 to support and promote difficult, interesting, and intelligent work, especially by women writers and artists. MIEL publishes chapbooks, collections of poetry and prose, and artist monographs. Lorsung holds a Bachelors degree in English and Japanese from the University of Minnesota, an MFA in Writing from the University of Minnesota, and a Ph.D. in Critical Theory from the University of Nottingham. She has also studied printmaking and drawing at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She currently lives in Belgium, where she edits the journal 111O (111oh.com) and co-runs MIEL (miel-books.com).

Come If You Dare

Presented as part of Anna Craycroft’s C’mon Language project and the TBA:13 Festival

A series of 12-15 mini-presentations and performances, 1-5 minutes apiece, whether funny, sad, tragic, or silly, but never indifferent, led by members of PNCA’s Critical Theory and Creative Research Collective under the title of its esteemed guest-lecturer series “Come If You Dare.” The task is to determine the stakes of the battle raging (often unacknowledged as such and, indeed, often imperceptibly) between process and telos at various levels of existence and to translate those stakes into felt reality. It’s a matter of time—how to deal with it, make it pass, fly, or stand still, speed up or run like molasses. Thought is a time-based art, but what happens to both time and thought without the notion of beginnings and endings, the model no longer perhaps being the span of human life? How are we to live under these conditions?

Performances will be followed by a discussion based on selected texts by Flusser, Bachelard, Arendt, Whitehead, and Lefebvre, during which we will consider a number of related distinctions and, sometimes, apparent binaries—continuity and discontinuity, chance and necessity, process and proceduralism, unity and chaos, the archaic and the contemporary, chickens and eggs, thought and cognition, activity and action, theory and practice, crisis and critique, code and communication, reality and aesthetics, and so on, . . . the gaps and dyssynchronies between “Let’s just keep going” versus “So what?” and “What’s your question?” and “How do we get from point A to point B, and what for?”

Had we but world enough, and time: George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature”; Jakob Johann von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: with a Theory of Meaning; Philip K. Dick, “The Evolution of a Vital Love”; Aristotle, On the Part of Animals; Franz Kafka, A Hunger Artist; Susanne Langer, “Symbolic Transformation”; E. H. Gombrich, “The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication”; Francis Bacon, The New Organon; RAND Corporation, A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates; Bruno Traven, The Death Ship; Mark Coeckelbergh, “You, Robot: On the Linguistic Construction of Artificial Others”

Curated by Anne-Marie Oliver and Barry Sanders

An open window, a cracked door, an echo, a vanishing edge, a train passing in the night, footsteps down long corridors, road, river, and sea, a pool of unknown depth, steps, bridges, towers, ships (if not cruise ships), skylights (if not dirty), reflections (if not of oneself or lacking the possibility of misrecognition as such), the word certain (esp. if used uncertainly), anagrams, also and etcetera and so forth, writing heavily slanted as though trying to walk, light streaming beneath a closed door, an 8 on its side, -o5, an egg of antediluvian dimensions, trees growing straight as arrows or, alternately, stunted and torqued by the wind, screens, spheres, ghosts (at midnight), the meeting place of sea and sky, mountain ranges (with no humans in sight), blurs, black velvet, long goodbyes and paradoxes, words that begin with gl, windmills (esp. if turning), spirals, sparks, rings, blue light, white snow, exact alignments, the future (by necessity undestroyed), circles and other round things, sacred copses, the scent of panthers and wild things as such, sun, moon, and stars, love, bliss, perspicacity, the hum of summer, an echo, a prayer—everything far away from the petty, the small, the confined, and the spiritually impoverished, everything offering the glimpse of another world, calling.

Born in Japan in 1961, artist and OSU professor Julie Green has had twenty-seven solo exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. She has been featured on National Public Radio and in the New York Times, Ceramics Monthly, and Gastronomica, and recently received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors. She is best known for The Last Supper, a project devoted to representing the last-meal requests of US death-row inmates in blue paint on second-hand porcelain plates. Green started work on The Last Supper in the summer of 2000, and intends to continue work on it as long as the death penalty is legal anywhere in the United States. As of this year, the series has grown to more than 500 plates, and is now on exhibit at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University.

Wednesday, May 1
10:30-12:30: Peter Falanga, The New Sincerity and the Courage of Woody Allen
12:30-1:30: LUNCH
1:30-3:30: Chloé Womack, Why we still want to create our culture instead of just buying it: The Self-determined Artist and the Alternative Space
3:30-5:30: Marshall Astor, The Black Shack

The MA in Critical Theory and Creative Research at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Ford Institute for Visual Education

Michael Powell is the owner of Powell’s City of Books, the largest independent bookstore in North America. In the early 1980s, he sponsored the author lecture series called Portland Arts & Lectures, and since then, has helped lead numerous civic and cultural organizations in the city, including the World Affairs Council, the Port of Portland, the Association for Portland Progress, the Metropolitan Arts Commission, the Multnomah County Library Board, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Board, the American Booksellers Association Board, the Portland Public Schools Foundation, the Portland State University Library Advisory Committee, and the SMART (Start Making a Reader Today) Program Advisory Committee, which he was instrumental in founding. Powell has been at the center of free-speech issues in Portland for the past twenty years, including the move to rescind Section 215 of the USAPATRIOT Act, which would have forced libraries and bookstores to release the names and book preferences of patrons. His awards include the Glen L. Jackson Award for Civic Leadership of Willamette University, the Watzek Award for Community Service of Lewis & Clark University, the Business Leadership Award of the Oregon Black Resource Center, the Thomas Lawson McCall Award of Women in Communication, and the Gene Leo Rose Award of the Portland Oregon Visitors Association.

———————About Geoffrey Mann
Embedding time and motion within concrete objects, Scottish sculptor Geoffrey Mann creates work that blurs the lines between art and research, thinking and making, theory and practice. He is the winner of the Newcomers Bombay Sapphire Award, the World Crafts Council-Europe EUNIQUE Award for Glass, and the Jerwood Contemporary Makers Prize, among others. Group exhibitions include Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA, New York (2008); European Glass Context at the Bornholm Art Museum and Grønbechs Gård, Bornholm, Denmark (2008); Collect at Saatchi Gallery, London (2009); Object Factory II: The Art of Industrial Ceramics at MAD, New York (2009); Power of Making at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); London, Talk to Me at MoMA, New York (2011); Curious Minds at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2012); and Mark-ing at Gallery Libby Sellers, London (2013). He is Programme Director of Glass at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh.

About Westwind
The 529-acre Westwind site at Cascade Head is one of the last largely undeveloped tracts on the Oregon coast. In the early 1960s, volunteers organized an effort to protect Cascade Headland from development; six years later, they had raised sufficient funds to purchase the property, after which they turned it over to the Nature Conservancy. The lands were designated a National Scenic-Research Area as well as a United Nations Biosphere Reserve in 1974. (http://www.westwind.org/)